Story #5: The braless vampire
(First, a side note: I have one final story with nudity from the directing for film class freshman year, but after a few cracks at it there just isn't enough to it to be a compelling full-length post. I'll share it in my short story collection I'll post at the end.)
So, let's skip ahead three years from my last post, to near the end of senior year. I'm heading up the sound department (which is a pretentious way of saying that there's one guy holding the boom mic who answers to me, and that's it) on my friend's senior film. Two-day shoot for a roughly fifteen-page script.
It's sort of a horror-themed family drama, where we start on a tense family (mom, dad, son, daughter) at the dinner table, things seem like normal family squabbling, until one of them gets up and we follow them and see that the doors are boarded up, there are newspaper postings about the end of the world all over the wall, and they listen in on a radio for broadcasts from survivors: The world has been taken over by vampires, though they are more bestial, zombie-like vampires that communicate primarily through hisses, growls, shrieks and an occasional single word or two. One female vampire in particular is harassing our central family, circling their house endlessly for days (since vampires can't enter without an invitation).
I won't bother going into any of the actors playing the core family or anyone else on the film crew, since none of them really play a role in the meat and potatoes of this story. I will discuss the "actress" playing the main vampire antagonist, though. I put "actress" in quotes because she was actually a film student, a sophomore two years under us who I only met on this shoot, who the director knew and cast because the role didn't really require any acting, per se, just hisses and sneers and growls.
But she looked the part: This girl was, even before makeup enhanced it, borderline albino-pale. Bleachy blond hair, porcelain skin, kind of an odd but pretty otherworldly vibe to her look. (Anyone ever see Juliet Landau as Drusilla on Buffy the Vampire Slayer? She looked not entirely unlike a younger, paler, blonde version of her.) Skinny, with very small breasts that were probably A-cups. Her wardrobe on the film consisted of red veiny makeup applied to her face, red contact lenses, some fake fangs she put in right before action was called, and a flowy, hippie-ish white top. Despite playing a hissing murderous vampire once action was called (who would indeed kill a couple of the protagonists before the end of the film), she was actually quite shy and soft-spoken.
We shot the film in reverse order: Day one, we shot the second half of the script, where the vampire gets inside and it turns into more fully horror/action/bloody type of thing. This all went fine. Then, day two, we shot the first half of the script, with the more family drama-centric stuff. One part of this day consisted of the son in the foreground of a shot, walking down a hallway and shouting some dialogue back at his parents, with the vampire growling at him through a window in the back of frame. Since there were two elements here to capture sound on, on other sides of a wall, at that, it immediately became clear that one would need the body mic. (The vampire actress could have ADRed in her hissing and growling in a sound booth later, but it just makes things way easier for the director/editor if we capture everything on set.)
(Now, a briefer on body mics, or lavaliers, as I'll call them: They are small microphones that you can attach to actors, pretty much always somewhere below the mouth. They run cords from the mic down to a little radio transmitter pack on the belt or in the pocket, etc. At least in film school, they were always treated as second choice behind boom mics, both because you have to hide them and boom mics supposedly had better sound quality and the actor didn't have to think about them, and I went many, many shoots with them never being used at all. But on the occasion they were used, clipping them on the inside of a tie or collar or button-down shirt works great. Or even a bra if the actress is comfortable with it, which I had done once before at this point. They can also be taped right onto the skin if need be, which I had done to a couple guys before.)
So, since the actor in the hallway's dialogue is more important to capture in detail than the vampire's hissing and growling noises, I make the easy call that of course he should get the boom mic and we should hook the lavalier onto her. I walk up to her and tell her this on the side of the set while everyone else is going over shots/adjusting lights or camera/rehearsing, not paying any mind to us. Of course, being a film student herself, she knows full well how lavaliers work.
Her: "I don't really have a collar or anything to clip it onto."
Me: "Um, well… would it be ok if we clip it onto your bra?"
She blushes a little. "I'm not wearing one," she kind of nervously laughs.
I probably blush a little myself at this point. I say that we can tape it to her skin and that she can do it herself if she knows how; she tells me that she'd probably have trouble with it because she can't see much of anything through her red contact lenses. I ask if she'd rather I get a female crew member to do it and walk her though it verbally or just go ahead and forget it and ADR the noises in later in a sound booth. She says something like "I'm a film student too, I know how much it sucks when the actors are a pain in the ass about tech stuff. Let's just go take care of it."
We walk off together to a bathroom on the "set" (the set of course being an actual suburban house, so it's just an actual bathroom). I get the radio pack and cord and mic and body tape ready. "Ok, how do you wanna do this?" "I guess you're pretty good at all this sound equipment stuff?" "Yeah, I know what I'm doing," I answer honestly. "Alright, let's just keep this between us," she says, blushing a little, and grabs hold of the bottom of her white top and lifts it up above her breasts in the classic Mardi Gras-style flashing pose, revealing her pale belly and very small breasts with nipples so incredibly pale pink they almost vanish into the breast skin around them.
I, not wanting to make her feel uncomfortable, resist the urge to make any comment or joke. I sit on the edge of the bathtub, face to tits, basically, and immediately start taping the body mic to her chest above her left breast, using only my finger tips and not touching the breast at all. (Unlike in my previous stories, I've actually had a decent amount of real-life sex at this point, so I'm able to keep any bugged-eye reactions in check - not to say I didn't still react that way in my mind, of course!) However, that said, there was no real looking away, since I had to apply the lavalier - I was staring right at her breasts from less than a foot away.
"These red contacts suck," she tells me.
"Oh yeah?" I kind of laugh, looking up and briefly making eye contact as I rub the tape down onto her upper breast.
"Yeah, they don't hurt exactly, but they feel weird."
I keep my eyes down this time, watching her breasts move up and down a little as she breathes. I can feel her heart beating a little fast in nervousness through her chest, though her nipples stay soft in the warm bathroom. "How about the fangs?"
"They don't hurt. It's hard to keep them in though, they're always falling out." I laugh as I adjust the mic upwards towards her head. "That sucks." "Yeah."
I worked quickly and professionally, and after about sixty seconds it was done, she pulled her top back down and kind of laughed and was like "Thanks. That was kind of awkward." "It's all good. If anyone asks we'll just say you put it on," I tell her.
As we exit the bathroom and get back to set (still with plenty of time before the shot goes off, as it's a complex tracking shot with lots of setup), she starts talking to me about her own idea for a film she's working on, a kind of elderly romcom set in a retirement home with over-80 actors. She then asks me about how senior year is going, etc. - weirdly, her flashing me and letting me touch her upper chest seems to have opened up her will to talk to me on set! We spent a lot of the last few hours of the shoot chit-chatting between shots. (Though the director was a good friend of mine, he was of course way too busy stressing with shots and actors and cameras and lights to chit-chat at all, so she was my conversation buddy for the day.) What had happened in the bathroom was not discussed at any point between me and her or me and anyone else, though it lingered in the air, unspoken.
Interestingly, she mentioned having a boyfriend (I wasn't disappointed by this, I had no plans of trying to get with her; I had a girlfriend at the time too). Here's the question I really want answered (and at this point, of course, will never know): Did she tell her boyfriend what had happened on set that day? Or did she keep it between us and us alone? And if she did tell him, was he turned on? Pissed? Indifferent? Did they fuck while talking about it? It's a mystery I'll be forever curious about!
Either way, the rest of the shoot went just fine. I graduated the very next month and never saw her again. But, as you can tell by me sharing this story now, I never forgot!
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